I'm Officially Not Following This Anymore

I started following the "Test Subjects Needed" viral marketing campaign because I originally thought that it was for "The Dark Knight Rises." Then I realized that it wasn't, but Terry O'Quinn from "Lost" was part of it, so I was still intrigued. But then it just got way too smart for me. So I just stopped following it. You can check out movieviral.com if you want to know what is going on with that campaign.

Here are my thoughts: I think that it is really cool that "Test Subjects Needed" trusted its fans enough to leave a lot of stuff up to them. However, if it becomes too smart, I tend to shut down. Which is what happened. I think the creators have to walk a fine line between trusting the fans and helping us out, but the creators of this campaign trust the fans WAY too much. And I think that is a problem. Plus, let's look at what they are doing the campaign for. You'd think it was for a video game or a movie with how intricate it is. But no, it's for gum. Really? Know your product, people.

Rant over.

I'm Not Smart Enough For This

I cannot claim any credit for figuring this stuff out. This viral marketing is WAY too over my head, but it is pretty interesting. On this website, they posted a recap of what happened so far. I'm still trying to make sense of it - so check out that website and I'll post my thoughts on it later.

Countdown Clock Leads to.... Another Countdown Clock!?! - UPDATE X2

The countdown clock on "Survival Code - The Genesis" finally reached zero!

If you click on the countdown clock, this is what you get:

I went to my profile but there were no new log files... yet. Now if you click on the countdown clock, you get this message:

So this countdown clock (which was the result of a countdown clock two weeks ago) leads to ANOTHER countdown clock?!? This is getting to be a bit much, right? Stay tuned!

UPDATE #1 - Now if you click on the countdown clock, you are taken to a page that looks like this:

Here's a closer image:

I have no idea what this is...

UPDATE #2: Still no idea what is going on, but the forums are blowing up with all sorts of ideas. People have tried overlaying this image on maps, star charts, navigation charts - you name it. Here is a screen shot of one of the ways people are trying to figure this thing out:

I'll keep updating this post as I find out more information...

Wrigley's 5 Gum is a Part of This Campaign Afterall

ust a real quick post - I finally have hardcore evidence that shows that the "Test Subjects Needed" viral marketing campaign is related to 5 Gum. What is my proof? I bought a pack of the gum, and what should appear right on the front of the package but Mr. Icefly himself.

Can you see him flying around behind the 5? I have other proof as well, but it is super late and I am very tired. I will post more about it tomorrow. But I have to end with this - while, it turns out, this might be affiliated with 5 Gum, I don't think that the TSN campaign is specifically for 5 Gum. I just think that they are working together. This is way too intricate and complicated of a campaign to just be for gum. Sorry Wrigley, but it's not even great gum. So the jury is still out as to who the campaign is actually for. Batman has to have minty fresh breath, right???

Survival Code and the Traelek Institute

I know I'm a little bit behind the times, but we hit a huge milestone during the whole Mission Icefly Rescue event that I wasn't able to post about because there was so much going on. This site has finally passed the 1,000 site hit mark! In fact, because viewership of my dorky little blog has increased drastically recently, we are currently at 1,290 site hits! Thank you so much for your continued support and I follow my two passions: Batman and advertising.

As I posted about recently, Mission Icefly, it seems, is over. We have rescued the Icefly from the different US cities and he seems to be safe and sound in a few lucky people's homes. That website lead to the next leg of the viral campaign: Survival Code. If you put in your log in information on that website, you are taken to your account page, shown below.

There are a lot of things to take away from this new webpage. At the top is your profile information (yes, my username is TheMarkKnight... Don't be jealous), and if you have filled out your profile all the way back at the Test Subjects Needed page this should be 100% complete. There is also an achievements section, of which there only seem to be two. Also, there is something about putting in a key code, but everything I have tried to type in so far does not work.

At the bottom right hand corner of the page, there are five comic book looking pages, each of them spouting the same info about the human senses and potential that Terry O'Quinn was saying in the video on the Survival Code website. Here are the comic book pages:

I don't really know what the purpose of those pages are, but if you look at the one with the drawing of O'Quinn, there is mention of the Traelek Institute. After searching for that institute on Google, I came across this website:

There is some basic information about the institute on the webpage, and then it says, "feel free to peruse the site," but there is nothing to peruse, yet. However, at the bottom of the page there is a telephone number. If you call that number it seems to be the main line of the Traelek Institute itself. They have you do a little word association quiz (to which you can leave your answers after the beep) but that is about it. They have you come up with the first thing you can think of when you hear the words decoy, ascent, blameless, and misguided. Besides that phone number, there is nothing else of any significance on that website. However, if you add each of those words, one at a time, to the end of the URL, you are taken to a new site. For example, www.traelekinstitue.com/decoy leads to this image:

At the bottom of that image (not pictured here), it says "sometimes It's necessary to sacrifice riches for salvation." Here are the rest of the pages, in no particular order. The last one is a brochure for a fictional academy, but a Google search of that academy yielded no results.

Here's my take on this whole campaign: MovieViral maintains that this is a campaign for Wrigley's Five Gum. I think that it is way too intricate and involved to just be a campaign for chewing gum. They even have a big name actor like O'Quinn as a part of this campaign - that's big bucks for gum, in my opinion. Do I think it is for "The Dark Knight Rises?" I haven't ruled that out yet. It's looking like it probably isn't, but I've been wrong before. I guess we will have to just wait until July 15 to figure anything else out about this intriguing campaign. The thing that will convince me the most that this is not part of TDKR is if something big happens with that marketing campaign between now and July 15. If nothing happens, however....

Maybe Mission Icefly IS for "The Dark Knight Rises," After All...

I know I've posted a lot today, but a thought just occurred to me. Remember the new countdown clock on the "Survival Code" website? Well it is set to get to zero on July 15th, at 1:00 pm. Guess what movie comes out on that day? "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2." And guess what teaser trailer is set to show before that film? The very first trailer for "The Dark Knight Rises." It is a huge coincidence - almost too big to go unnoticed. I know I've gone back and forth, but maybe this whole "Test Subjects Needed" business is part of the marketing campaign for the next Batman film. If so - John Locke in a Batman film? Genius. The guy is a very talented actor. Stay tuned as I try to find out some more information.

New Website Launched (Part of Mission Icefly)

If you watch the weird video on the Mission Icefly rescue page, towards the end a URL flashes on the screen. The URL leads to a website called "Survival Code - The Genesis."

The full video is posted at the bottom of that website. If you watch that video and wait until the very end, there is a little interactive clip that you can participate in (hint: just follow the icefly). This little clip leads to ANOTHER countdown clock - this one ending in two weeks. I guess that is all we will find out for now, but I am definitely interested in what is going on with this campaign. No way it is for gum, right?

Mission Icefly Rescue Full Video

Someone on YouTube posted the entire, non-broken video that is playing on the Mission Icefly Rescue site. I have no idea what is going on.

Mission Icefly Continued

Well, it certainly has been a busy day. I'm not quite sure if you could tell that by the fact that I updated the previous post 12 times. All the cities have been cleared, so now we are just waiting to see what happens. Will we soon be able to see the website that I only got a glimpse of when the sight first went live??? I promised pictures from the campaign so here they are, in no particular order. I wasn't fast enough to get them all, but here are most of them. We will start with Dallas.

While this was going on, Mission Icefly was also operating a Flickr page where people could upload pictures of them receiving the package. This is what it seems like took place: at the location was a black envelope with the Icefly printed on it. Inside the envelope was a key, which would open a lock, labeled "fortress" that was on a giant box, labeled "human preservation project." inside the box was the cool light up statue of the Icefly. Still no word on what this is for yet... So stay tuned.

Mission Icefly Begins! - UPDATED X12

The countdown clock has reached zero!

When you get to the Mission Icefly website, the timer is just blinking a bunch of zeros. If you scroll your mouse over the eye looking thing to the right of the timer, there seems to be some static interference. Click on it, and it opens up like the shutter of a camera, and theicefly (for lack of better name) flies right through it, into a barely lit tunnel.The next page that loads, at least for the first few minutes that the website was live, looked like this:

If you notice, all of the major cities are listed on either side of a video screen, but right now all that can be seen is a bunch of static interference. The text beneath it says "You are needed for Mission Icefly - the search has begun." The search for what?!? Also, he new URL has the word 'rescue' added to the end of it - who or what needs rescuing?

Underneath that text, there are a bunch of pentagons, which reminds me of the pentagon that was present in the ID badge that I made at the beginning of this campaign. And finally, underneath that is a list of numbers with the heading "In The Field" above it. I'm assuming those are the people that are going out there to these locations.

However, now if you click on the camera shutter type thing on the mission icefly webpage, all that comes up is a black screen with "Orlando" and "New York" links. If you click on the Orlando link, the following comes up:

It's a picture of... a bench? I don't really get it. And, where is this package that they speak of? Clicking on the link for New York doesn't provide much more insight:

...except that it is not an image of a bench, but of the threshold of some building/apartment/house. What is going on??? I'll keep updating as more pictures from the other cities are uploaded. I know I've said this before, but this is supposedly not for "The Dark Knight Rises." However, I can't shake the fact that the next leg of the viral marketing campaign is set to start any minute now... stay tuned!

UPDATE #!:

I'm going to be posting short and sweet updates as more occurs throughout the day. Before, you could click on Orlando and New York to be taken to a PDF, which I wrote about in the last post. Now, you can no longer click on New York. Mission (partly) accomplished?

UPDATE #2:

Now Orlando is gone, and New York has been credited to Nrickolai.

UPDATE #3:

Chicago, Boston and Nashville now listed in the cities, along with their PDFs. Pictures to come soon.

UPDATE #4:

All the cities are listed now, but not all of them are clickable links. Only Chicago, Boston and Nashville are able to be clicked on.

UPDATE #5:

Boston and Chicago have been crossed out.

UPDATE #6:

Nashville's out, too, but Atlanta, Dallas and Washington DC have been added. I will post the pictures soon. I have noticed, however, that at the top of each of the PDFs, there are coordinates to the location that is pictured, presumably. Furthermore, each picture seems to be of a bench or a plant. Stay tuned...

UPDATE #7:

Atlanta is out, and now, at the top of the website, there is a creepy video playing. If you watch it for long enough, you start to see some clearer pictures and Terry O'Quinn's voice. You can't ever hear completely what he says, but only the beginnings of two sentences. The first starts with, "We experience every second through our senses..." and the second starts with, "Who and what we are is taken..."

UPDATE #8:

Still waiting on Dallas (that's what you get when you pick Dallas over Houston...). Meanwhile, over on Twitter, @NCrist posted pictures of what was included in the package. It seems to be some kind of light up statue of the Icefly - check out the pics:

UPDATE #9:

There has been more added to the video, including O'Quinn saying, "They define how we..." Presumably he is still talking about the senses. There are also some shots of a red-headed girl in a car and what appears to be a young male pilot flying a military plane.

UPDATE #10:

The FLICKR account for Mission Icefly has been updated with pictures from New York, Orlando, Chicago and Nashville, the first cities completed. The statue came in a wooden box stuffed with packaging "hay." It would have been really cool if I got my hands on one of those...

UPDATE #11:

Dallas is finally closed, and the links for Phoenix and Denver are now live. More of the video has been posted as well, and it is just as weird.

UPDATE #12:

San Francisco and Las Vegas are both live.

Mission Icefly Update

On Saturday I posted about the updates to the Mission Icefly website - a new version of their Bonnaroo video was posted online and some mysterious letters appeared at the bottom of the page. Well, more and more letters have been added to the original ones, and now it is quite obvious what they are spelling out. Take a look for yourself:

It is clearly spelling out major cities across the United States. As of this posting, all the letters have been filled in, and the cities are:

• Los Angeles
• Phoenix
• Las Vegas
• Portland
• Dallas
• Washington, DC
• Nashville
• Chicago
• Denver
• Orlando
• Seattle
• Boston
• New York
• San Fransisco
• Atlanta

Along with those cities, the following instructions are posted: "ATTENTION TEST SUBJECTS: Starting at 00:00:00:00:000 we will need one volunteer in each of the listed locations to follow a signal. Details: bring a mobile phone with you. You will need to use your online user name from TestSubjectsNeeded.com during the mission. Only one package available per location (first come, first served)."

What could that package be? Why isn't Houston one of the cities? When are people supposed to go to these places, and where are they supposed to go? My guess is that when the clock reaches zero (this Thursday around 1:00 pm), the city names will be clickable links with coordinates of some sort. Then, who ever gets to that location first will be the lucky person that gets the package.

This is all very reminiscent of a part of the "Why So Serious" campaign, when the Joker released coordinates to different bowling alleys around the world, along with a locker number and combination. Inside that locker was a Joker-ized bowling ball and other collectible goodies, along with a cell phone and a number to call and enlist yourself as part of Joker's army.

Did I get one of those bowling balls? Nope - I was thirty seconds too late. Literally. I was the second person there. And, just to add insult to injury, one of those packages went on to sell for several thousand dollars on eBay. That's right. THOUSAND.

This whole campaign definitely has the scent of 42 Entertainment all over it. I just can't shake the feeling that it might be "The Dark Knight Rises" related, even though I've heard again and again that it is definitely not. But there is no way it is for gum, right? I guess we will have to wait until Thursday to find out.

By the way - is anyone that frequents this site currently in any of the cities listed above? If so, let me know if you'd be interested in doing some field work for me. I can't promise any pay... but I can promise a good time. That sounds shady.